Time in New Zealand

I’ve tried to write this post for a few days now, but I’m not sure exactly what I want to say.

When you spend too much time away from a thing, it can be difficult coming back to it. You start to overthink it. You begin to wonder why you ever did the thing at all, or why you even want to do it again. You can paralyze yourself with worry and doubt.

I’ve kept this blog for well over a decade, but I don’t post nearly as often as I used to. Things change. At some point, I got bored with my photographs, and with whatever I had to say about them. I began to feel like just another voice, clamoring to be heard over all the noise. I prefer the quiet.

I still take a lot of photographs, I’m just a bit quieter about them. I’m trying to do things differently when I can, experimenting and taking more risks, but it doesn’t come as easily as it used to. There’s something to be said for youthful abandon and misplaced confidence. It’s more difficult to posture when you’re more aware of your shortcomings.

I spend a lot of time thinking about art and photography and what it means to have your own voice in a thing, and how that voice can change over time. How it becomes weathered and more comfortable with itself, but also, for me, how that comfort has inversely affected how much I want to talk about my work.

In the simplest terms, I’ve tried to be a sponge, to soak up beauty and to put that beauty back out there in whatever small and unique way I can. And maybe I don’t need to talk about anything more than that. Maybe that’s the post.

So here are a few pictures I think are beautiful and that showcase a bit of beauty in the world, from the north and south islands of New Zealand, and one or two from Australia, while I was skipping through. Let’s not make too much of it.